


Ahsoka and the Revelation

by Merfilly



Series: Ahsoka's Nightmare [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Emotional Baggage, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-21
Updated: 2016-08-21
Packaged: 2018-08-10 03:09:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7828159
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another bad mission, and Ahsoka goes to where there is some comfort. Only, things go downhill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ahsoka and the Revelation

Five years of Imperial control was too much. Ahsoka growled as she picked her way through the burned out city. She had to know for certain… yet her search so far had been fruitless. 

"Fulcrum," her comm called to her, and she raised the armguard it was built into. 

"Fulcrum here," she said through her modulator.

"No survivors on the north side."

"Fall back to the ship." She swept the city with a desperate reach through the Force, finding no life. Later, she would add the unnamed of this city to her litany, knowing good and damn well she had failed, yet again, to act quickly enough.

+++

She tried hard not to go to Seelos too often. Rex, Wolffe, and Gregor never turned her away, but she hated the way her mind refused to settle near the two that were not hers, and Rex… Rex was an entirely different problem for her.

She needed her friend, though. 

Luckily, her personal ship was known to Rex, and he understood her need to not meet in the AT-TE all that often. He was jogging across the field before she got the hatch down, coming aboard without waiting for her to appear.

"Heard about Kinoth," he said gruffly, looking her over. She hadn't cloaked herself yet, so he could see the char and bruising from her searching for survivors. "Go clean up, Commander," he added. "I'm here."

She nodded, accepting the unspoken offer of protection. She went and actually used the real shower, knowing she could fill her water tanks again. Still, old habits died hard, and she kept it short, so the water used wouldn't overtax her recycler. When she came out, she was in just a robe, her gear floating behind her for a thorough maintenance. 

"Want to talk about it?" Rex asked her, having placed food and kaf close at hand for her. He took her blasters to tear them down for cleaning, leaving her armor to her touch.

"I had the intel, Rex. We went in too late, though. And lost an entire cell tat was poised just right for reporting on the garrison there."

"If you had been there, one day earlier, what do you think would have happened?" he asked as his hands deftly broke the blasters down to components. Her shoulders fell a little. "You know. You know that your team would have been caught in the fighting, and you would have been killed or captured."

"Never again," she hissed at that last. The glint in her eyes promised she would provoke her captors to kill her rather than submit again to the kind of torture she'd faced.

" _Vod_ , you know the Inquisitors are out there. Every mission that goes bad enough for you to pull your lightsabers brings them closer to you." Rex looked at her hands, saw the tremors in them as she was cleaning a sensor array.

"They're former Jedi. Or Force users that didn't make it through the Temple," she said softly. "I don't want to think about them right now."

"What do you want to think about?" Rex asked, changing tactics with her. He needed, desperately, to find a way to unwind her from her mission's failure.

Ahsoka stopped working for a minute, her eyes closing. "How to reach the Emperor and shove both my blades into his chest," she said honestly, opening her eyes to meet his.

"That means facing Vader."

Ahsoka shuddered violently at those four words. She knew it, knew she stood no chance of reaching the Emperor without going through his leashed dog, but Vader… frightened her more than facing the Emperor did.

Rex had seen, in the year since she rescued him and Wolffe, that Vader seemed to be a personal crisis for her. Was the enforcer of the Emperor's will someone she knew? Did she really know who was in that mask?

Was it a _Jetii_ she had respected?

All of those questions swirled in his mind, but he bit the questioning back, especially when she assaulted her gear in the next moment, fingers moving swiftly to pry everything out, clean it, tune it, and place it back.

Over the next hour, there was only silence, and he wondered if he had pushed too hard on a nerve. Yet when all her gear was back in place, and she had gathered it in a neat pile, she looked at him over the remains of the food and kaf seriously.

"If I disappear, Rex, I don't want you to sing my name."

"What?!"

How could she even ask that of him?

She tipped her chin in that defiant way she had. "If I vanish, and the Emperor is not dead, I do not want my name remembered. For it will mean I failed."

"Not the way it works," he growled at her. "You have lived your entire life in the shadow of war, or right in the middle of it, same as me. You think they shouldn't call my name out, if I go down without redeeming my men from the curse they fell to?" he asked her angrily.

She crumpled a little under his onslaught. "I was supposed to protect them! It's at the heart of the promise I made them all!" she retaliated, voice low, but intense.

"I was made to lead them well, and where the _haran_ was I when they needed me most?!" he snapped at her. "Get your head out of your _shebs, vod_ , because that _poodoo_ isn't cutting it with me!"

She looked at him with a look that was as frankly mutinous as the ones she had given their General when he deemed a mission too dangerous for her. For half a heartbeat, he could see that girl once again in the woman that sat across from him. And then it faded, replaced with that distant, lost look he'd seen far too often after the bad missions, the one she had hidden from their men, from their General… but never from him.

She had always trusted him with her real emotions.

" _Vod'ika_ ," he said more gently. "You're one being. Very strong, very brave, very skilled… but _jetiise_ with years more practice and training than you had to have tried to tear him down. You heard the reports from Kessel! Vader killed an entire squad of _jetiise_ that were waiting in a trap made for the man! And you know the _hut'uun_ on the throne has to be more powerful. It's the way of the Sith to kill those that grow weak!"

"I just want to save him!" she blurted out, trapped by all her conflicted feelings, by Rex's honesty, and by her loyal nature.

Rex paled, and would have fallen if he hadn't been sitting as her words, what they were talking about, and all her fear about Vader slammed home in his mind.

"No… no, _vod_ , no!" he said in horror at the very idea. She collapsed back against the seat she was in, bringing her hands up to hide her face, blinking angry, frightened tears back. That, seeing her like that, broke his shock enough for him to join her on that side of the table, putting his arms around her shoulder, ignoring the instinctive tension for what it was, a memory of pain, to offer comfort.

After a long, ragged moment, she turned into his hold and let him comfort her, let him feel her tears soaking his shirt, as Ahsoka Tano finally broke under the weight of what she knew to be truth.

**Author's Note:**

>  _vod_ = sibling, _jetii_ = jedi, _haran_ = hell, _poodoo_ = fodder, _shebs_ = backside, _hut'uun_ = coward, _jetiise_ = plural jedi, _vod'ika_ = little sibling


End file.
